In my preparation to lead a Livestrong group at the Y, I was required to take a few group fitness instructor certification courses. In one of them, there was a well-meaning but insane piece of advice - "Use the medical names for bones and muscles. Don't say 'hips;' say 'pelvic girdle' instead. Don't say 'shin;' say 'tibia.' It will make you sound credible." Before I get into the education connection here, let me just say if you have to resort to a technique to sound credible, you aren't credible.
Meanwhile, actual group fitness instructors rarely do this. They use imagery to help their members know what to do. Greg, a cycle instructor, doesn't say, "align your tibia with the vertical post of pedal shaft" or "keep your transverse arch parallel to the floor" because he knows that would not only make him sound ridiculous, it also wouldn't be at all helpful to members trying to keep good cycle form. Instead, he says, "It should feel like you are scraping gum off the bottom of your shoe." Everyone can imagine that and benefit from it. Dana teaches Barre, where alignment from head to toe is important to prevent injury. She explains everything in detail once, but after that she says, "Zip up your body suit." And just like that, everyone is able to see if their alignment is correct in the mirror. These are examples of language that is accessible to the learner rather than feeding the ego of the instructor.
Teachers, have you taken a look at your state objectives? If you have, you know they can be more difficult to interpret than contract legalese. Here's one from the NC Chemistry curriculum. "PS.Chm.4.3 Use mathematics and computational thinking to analyze quantitatively the composition of a substance (empirical formula, molecular formula, percent composition, and mole conversions)." Y'all, I taught chemistry for ten years, and this is a crazy sentence. For one thing, computational thinking is mathematics, and you can't analyze something quantitatively without those, so there are few redundancies here whose purpose seems to be only to make the sentence longer. Also the examples cover several chapters of material, so you can't possibly use this for one lesson. Given that many school require the objective to be written on the board, you are going to have some confused and frightened students if you just throw this up at the beginning of your lesson. If were teaching chemistry now, I would write, "Write chemical formulas for ionic compounds" because that is the level students can comprehend and explains what we will be doing TODAY.
The same is true of unnecessarily complex vocabulary. Do you need to use the word hydrodynamic? You might; it depends on what you are teaching and how old your students are. But you might be better served by the words "fluid motion" (or with really young students, the world liquid will probably do). I stopped reading a book once because the author was more interested in showing off her vocabulary than she was in readers learning from her work.
Is there a time when it is appropriate to use more complex language. Absolutely. It is when doing so serves a purpose. Going back to the group fitness examples, it would absolutely make sense to teach class members the term pelvic girdle if the movement you want them to do involves 360º of motion. Then, you are prompting the imagery of a girdle, something that surrounds the entire area, not just the left and right motion of the hips. When doing back focused exercises while weight lifting, we sometimes work a few different muscles during the same song, Matt will sometimes bring focus to whichever muscle we happen to be working with that exercise as an act of clarity. When we are working the latissimus dorsi, he uses the name and says, "you know, like a shark's dorsal fin." In that case, knowing the name is helpful for remembering its location. That's a thoughtful use of the scientific name, not a pretentious act of "gaining credibility."
As a physics teacher, the difference between velocity and speed matters. In regular life, it doesn't. When I taught 8th graders that there is no such thing as cold, only the movement of heat in our out of a substance, I told them, "This matters a lot in science, but please don't be the person who responds to someone saying it is cold with, 'Actually, it is less hot' because you will sound like a nutcase."
If you have ever been on an IT help call with someone who uses all the jargon and treats you like you are dumb for not understanding it, you might have some empathy with your students. When teaching students, use the technical language that matters (and explicitly teach them what it means), but use your speech to make your content more accessible, not less. It doesn't matter how great your lesson was if you used so much lofty language that they can't understand it.
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